During the 2010 baseball season, lefthander Josh Spence will be writing about his life as a student-athlete who prepares for his final season of college baseball as well as graduating from Arizona State. Spence will check in periodically to write about school, baseball, life and other things.

It’s been a very interesting week thus far, gearing up for official practice starting today. Monday was photo day for our team and to see the look on the faces of such guys like Joey DeMichele, Devin Marrero and Brady Rodgers who were putting the uniform on for the first time and to see the excitement they had was awesome to be around. I'm not saying that I still don’t get that tingle of putting on the maroon and gold; it was cool this time to just sit and observe the guys trying to get the socks pulled up just right then running into the bathroom and checking themselves out in the mirror. Ha-ha!

Another good experience for our club, and a special thanks to everyone who came down to support us, was our pre-season banquet on Wednesday night. It was a great event and much fun was had, seeing past players mingling with the present team is always something special. I was very fortunate to see a lot of new and familiar faces, one guy that really sticks out in my mind was a man by the name of John Jacobs, who played in the ‘Winkles Era’. (Editor’s Note: John Jacobs was a member of the first ever ASU varsity baseball team in 1959. He played in 1959 and 1960.) If I'm looking that good at his age, I’ll be thanking my lucky stars. To see someone who is still so passionate about ASU many years after they have played here really makes you think about what’s important in life. Thank you to everyone who came out, I can only hope that the turn out for our Alumni game coming up on February 6 is just as good as what we had Wednesday!

It’s now Friday, and today marks the first day of official practice! We’ve been competing through our strength and conditioning, we’ve been competing in the batting cage and we’ve been competing in the clubhouse with all the games we like to play, but now we get to compete on the field and start to put it together for another season of playoff atmosphere and high expectations here at ASU and things couldn’t be better. As I've said earlier, growing is a choice and there’s nothing we’ve had to do this fall, but there’s a lot we’ve wanted to do, and now we’re getting ready to see if the hard work has paid off, only time will tell.

Once again thank you to everyone who was able to make it on Wednesday, what a great turn out we had!

As the season comes around, if there are questions you’d like me to answer or if you’d like more insight of the life as a Sun Devil baseballer, please feel free to email me at OverThePlate@gmail.com and I’ll try to put as much as I can in my blog each week. Thank you for all your feedback thus far!